Direct Male

I’m scouring the garage, looking in vain for the cleaning rags.

“They’re right there,” my wife says.

What I hear is, “Theh roit theh.” She’s British.

“Right where?”

“Roit theh, in the cubbahd.”

Now I’m looking for a cupboard, something like a pantry, and I’m wondering why anybody would stick a cupboard in the garage and store the cleaning rags alongside the Oreos and Folger’s. Or, in our case, the McVitie’s Digestives and Twinings Assam tea. She’s that British.

Frustrated, I throw my arms out.

“I don’t see a cupboard,” I say. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s that black cupboard, right there, in the corner.”

Cubbahd, roit theh, in the cohnah.

All I see is a black tool cabinet, the kind that rolls. I’m not from England. I’m from Sampson County, North Carolina.

“You mean this thing here?” I say.

“Of cohse,” she says. “The cubbahd. The rags ah in theh.”

Indeed, that’s where the rags are. Right in the Craftsman tool cabinet, known at my house as a cupboard, pronounced cubbahd.

It’s that accent of hers. Brits can say anything, and it sounds pretty. I’m convinced that all Judy would have to do is speak, and she could get out of a traffic stop or snag a full refund for something she bought and used ten years ago. Her accent is beautiful: clean, elegant, ridiculously English. And often, it’s impossible to understand – well, not the accent so much as the words that come through it.

The first couple of times she mentioned using a sahspun, I had no idea that she meant a saucepan. A piece of kitchen roll, I’ve learned, is a paper towel. A beaker is a drinking glass. Jim-jams are pajamas. Soft drinks come in alyu-minium cans. When she does something sharpish, she means she doesn’t waste time. If someone is on the boil, they’re angry. If they’re pottering around the house, they’re doing small jobs and taking it easy.

Pants are a problem with the British. To them, pants are underwear. Shorts are underwear, too. Smalls are also underwear. When they mean pants, they say trousers.

And when they mean soccer, they say football. I’ve been told more than once to get that straight.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Judy’s turns of phrase are as English as afternoon tea, and I’m not saying she talks funny. Her voice has roots in the outer reaches of London, the received pronunciation, as it’s called. It’s not at all like the flat Brummie sound of Birmingham or the nasal Souser of Liverpool. England has around forty accents, each one unique and local.

Everybody has an accent of some kind, of course, and our natural voice can tell others where we grew up. Every time I get on the phone with my buddy Danny, who lives up in our hometown of Clinton, I hear myself head for the country and talk like the old me, the real me, shifting into double negatives and violating the trusted rules that govern clear, coherent communication.

If we talk used cars, which we do often, I’ll say something like, “I seen one the other day, nothin’ but a hunk o’ junk. I ain’t got no money to throw away on a car that ain’t been took care of.”

“I know the one you’re talkin’ about,” Danny will say. “I’ll bet it ain’t seen been serviced since Nixon was in the White House. The old thing’s wore out. Transmission whines like a spoiled young ’un.”

“There’s probably possums sleepin’ under the hood.”

“With all the fumes comin’ out of that motor,” Danny will say, “them possums ain’t sleepin’.”

We hang up after 40 minutes of that kind of talk, and I see Judy shaking her head.

“It’s like you’re a different person when you talk to him,” she says. “I don’t understand a word you say.”

“Well,” I reply, “I guess Sampson County is a long way from Royal Berkshire.”

“A very long way,” she says.

The English she speaks took shape across thousands of years of development and population movement to arrive at Celtic society. Then, in 55 BC, the Romans showed up. They were followed by the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, the Flemish, the Danes, the Scots, the French, and probably some others. Alas, that’s a lot of foreign languages. Mix them up through countless generations of intermarrying and more moving around, and finally Old English came along. Even then, it was a far cry from today’s English. If people didn’t comprehend something, they said, “Iċ ne understande.” I’ll bet they said that a lot.

As for my English, I suppose it came about through her English, along with the influence of Native Americans and Africans and whatever Europeans wandered into Sampson County. Filter that through 250-plus years of dirt farming and barely traveling more than a few miles from home, and you have me talking to Danny about used cars while my wife rolls her British eyes.

The only word she and I share is “boot” to refer to the trunk of a car. I have no idea why, but I grew up with that. Until I met Judy, it was my only British English.

When you marry someone, you commit to the whole person, including the way they speak. Now, at our first anniversary, we often find ourselves in a familiar place: I say tomAYto; she says tomAHto. (The same goes for potatoes and potahtoes.)

We finished our vows with a kiss, which Judy calls a snog. Then we started off toward our future, the pair of us speaking our two distinct Englishes while we learn a language all our own.

Tim Bass is a retired creative writing teacher and journalist. He lives in Wilmington. Mark Weber is a Wilmington-based artist and illustrates WILMA’s monthly Direct Male essay. weberillustration.com

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